High speed electronic communications, such as telecommunication data being transmitted via a satellite, often include converting data in parallel format to data in serial format (referred to as serialization) and subsequently converting data in serial format to data in parallel format (referred to as deserialization). A device that performs this serialization and/or deserialization is referred to as a serializer/deserializer, or more commonly a SerDes.
The harsh environment faced by a satellite can increase the challenge of a SerDes design for satellite applications. One of the primary environmental risks in a satellite application is associated with the ionizing radiation environment present in space. It should be noted that radiation effects associated with ionizing radiation are also present in terrestrial applications, though the rate of occurrence in terrestrial applications is significantly lower than in space applications. The ionizing radiation environment includes heavy ions, protons, and neutrons which can impact the normal operation of semiconductor via single event effects (SEE), total ionizing dose (TID), and/or displacement damage dose (DDD). The effects of TID and DDD are generally cumulative over the mission duration and impact semiconductor parameters including current leakage. The effects of SEE are generally instantaneous and can impact the operation of the semiconductor circuit. These SEE effects include single event latchup (SEL), single event upset (SEU), single event transient (SET), and single event functional interrupt (SEFI). Mitigation for SEL can be provided via use of a technology such as silicon on insulator (SOI). The effects of SEU, SET, and/or SEFI can include causing a SerDes communication line (commonly referred to as a lane) to go into an invalid state (an example would be loss of lock) in which valid data is no longer being transmitted or received for an extended period of time. The loss of valid data for an extended period of time (an example is a time period greater than −10 to −100 microseconds) can result in a considerable amount of data being lost, especially for high speed SerDes lanes operating at high speeds (examples of which are in the range 3.125 to 22+Gbps). The typical mitigation for such effects is to re-initialize, power cycle, or otherwise reset the SerDes lane. This can take an undesirable amount of time to detect and remedy the problem, and data can be lost in the meantime. In some applications, the rapid detection and resetting of a non-functional SerDes communication lane is tolerable, while other applications have very little allowance for even small losses of data, requiring a more robust approach that minimizes or avoids such issues.
It is against this background that the techniques disclosed herein have been developed.